


Blackout

by Cunien



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: A lot of the F word, Angst, At least slightly force-sensitive Poe Dameron, Disability, Force-Sensitive Poe Dameron, Gen, Hurt Poe Dameron, Hurt/Comfort, Interrogation, M/M, Major Character Injury, Medical Procedures, Poe Dameron Hurts So Prettily, Poe Dameron Needs A Hug, Surgery, Swearing, Torture
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-08
Updated: 2018-02-08
Packaged: 2019-03-15 15:03:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,992
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13615869
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cunien/pseuds/Cunien
Summary: "There are reprimands. There are angry voices, and careful voices, and pitying voices. There are words likesorryandhonorableanddischarge. "In the aftermath of a life-changing crash, Poe Dameron seeks to come to terms with a new reality.*This is inspired by and written as my own unofficial sequel to aslippersloth's "Burnout". It was written with the deepest respect and is not intended to step on the author's toes! I just adored "Burnout" and wanted to see more. However it can also be taken as a stand-alone.WARNING: While not terribly graphic, be aware that there's some medical stuff coming in chapter 2 that is non-consensual. But there will be a happy ending - or at least, the beginnings of one - I promise.





	Blackout

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Burnout](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5676907) by [aslipperysloth](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aslipperysloth/pseuds/aslipperysloth). 



He doesn’t come back all in one go, like in holovid movies where the lighting is perfect and the actor doesn’t look like he’s at death’s door. Poe is aware - when he can pull together enough of his fraying mind to understand things like awareness - that he has woken up and fallen back into oblivion maybe five or six times. Sometimes it was a flickering of his lashes, a wince of too-bright light for a second or two and then the sinking cool of darkness rushed in to claim him like the tide. Another time it was long enough for him to croak out a word - perhaps _water_ or _what_ or _Finn_. 

He remembers crying, once - maybe more than once - the tears scalding from eyes he couldn’t summon the strength to open, and the shame was hot and livid and terrifying in his veins. He wanted to speak but the words came out jumbled, or not at all, and the frustration only added to the fucking awfulness of it all.

Sometimes there were people by his bedside - he could feel them even when they didn’t speak, a thrumming presence out there beyond his closed eyelids. Every now and then a callused, steady hand took his, swirled little circles in the web of skin between his thumb and forefinger. He tried to tell his muscles to grip back, even the ghost of a tightening would do, though his body rebelled and his mind grew too tired to remember what it was supposed to be asking.

But here, three weeks after _it_ happened, Poe Dameron wakes up.

*

Doctor Kalonia explains things to him slowly, and repeats herself often, and Poe feels a rush of gratitude for her patience even though it makes him feel like a child. 

“We don’t have enough bacta for a tank these days, I’m afraid, but the bandages did the job. Your shoulder is healing nicely.”

Poe shifts a little in his bed as though to test his wound with movement, tries to shake off the echoes of his own screams. The way his flesh felt around the hot metal of the ruined X-Wing’s hydraulic line that lanced through him is sitting somewhere at the back of his mind. He rolls his shoulder to burn out the memory with the throbbing insistence of pain.

Kalonia moves around the side of his bed with a chart of some kind in her hand. Her face is professionally blank. “Your legs, on the other hand…” She looks Poe in the eye, gaze unwavering. “The left is beginning to heal. The right is damaged. Quite badly.”

She sits down, scoots the chair a little closer to Poe’s bed with a soft grating sound that winces through his brain. He’s trying to breathe, trying to keep the nausea at bay, trying not to let the panic uncurl itself into his limbs and give him away with the tremor that he’s gripping tight to.

“How badly?” His voice sounds like it belongs to someone else, though it’s mercifully steady.

“I won’t pull my punches with you, Captain Dameron,” she says, squarely. “We managed to save your leg but the bones are damaged beyond their ability to heal. Amputation is absolutely the very last resort when it comes to options.” Kalonia pauses as Poe blanches visibly, before continuing, “Ideally, we would operate, graft the bones with surgical metal, but it’s a new procedure successfully completed by only two surgeons. One of them is affiliated with the First Order...and the other was on Hosnian Prime when it was destroyed.”

“So, where does that leave me?” Poe asks, after a while.

“I’m afraid you’re in uncharted territory, Captain,” Kalonia says, though not unkindly. She pats his arm and stands up. “Rest. Recover. Then we’ll see where you are.”

*

It turns out no amount of willpower and cocky confidence can grow back his bones. Poe catches a glimpse of a holo-scan once and nearly vomits into the nearest trash can. Most of his fibula is gone, and the other bone - the tibia, he thinks it’s called - is frayed and thin. It doesn’t really look like a bone anymore. At night he pulls up his pants leg and stares for hours, trying to see through the puckered pink scars on his skin, trying to see where his muscles refuse to knit and the bone stands wrecked and ruined, purposeless. His eyes prickle and redden as he stares and stares and stares. 

There’s not a chance in The Void that Poe’s going to submit to the wheelchair they scraped up out of some long-forgotten storeroom for him. He hobbles around on crutches, crooked grin, dishevelled hair, working it. He takes some ground-crew mechanic with big brown eyes and a too-wide smile into the tool room and fucks her as best he can, but the pity and care behind those pretty eyes is too much, and when they’re done and she leaves he vomits till his stomach is raw - from the pain, from the sheer fucking patheticness of it all. 

He doesn’t look at Finn, if he can help it. Oh, it would be wonderfully convenient if a near-fatal X-Wing crash could have knocked some sense in them, jarred their feelings to the surface all tidy and neat, but real life doesn’t work that way. Finn was there, when Poe thought it was the end. Finn was there to see him screaming, covered in blood and piss, impaled and imobile. Finn has seen quite enough of him, Poe thinks.

He works hard at not seeing Finn, either. Not seeing the hurt in the other man’s eyes when Poe ducks into a conversation whenever Finn walks into a room, or when Poe always has somewhere else to be or something super important to do, buddy, sorry, catch you later, okay! 

So Poe ducks and swerves and the time he doesn’t spend in the rehab room dutifully exercising under the watchful eye of a physical therapist he spends staring, staring at his ruined leg and wondering how everything could get so utterly destroyed so quickly.

A month after waking up, Poe’s too tired of not asking the question. There’s an X-wing without a pilot sitting in the corner of the hanger. It’s not his, of course - not his beautiful black ship - but it’s still a sight for very sore eyes. 

Poe divests himself of his crutches and lurches a ladder over to the ship. It’s hard going, but he won’t let that talk any sense into him. He’s sweating by the time the ladder rests against the side of fighter. He grips both rails with palms gone slick and hot, takes a moment to let his breath ease back into tight lungs. 

The rational part of his brain tries to tell him that even if he could scale the ladder and reach the cockpit he’d never be able to operate the pedals, but he shakes it away with a twitch of his head and says, “Now or never, Dameron.”

At first he tries to raise the right leg, let his left take the weight, but his right foot curls insistently upright while the muscles that should control it twitch and flail. Undeterred, Poe places his right foot back on to the ground, lets it ease back level, lets his heart stop beating so wildly. His left leg then. He grips the side rails of the ladders harder, taking as much of his weight as he can in his upper body so that he can lift his left foot to the first rung, but he’s barely settled his foot against it when his shoulder - not quite healed - begins to thrum with the agony of holding his weight. Poe can’t get his good foot back underneath him before his left arm lets go. His weight lands back on his ruined leg and he buckles into a heap on the ground with a gasp of pain.

He’s breathing through the nausea, pushing the black edges back from vision that threatens to narrow to a tunnel when he feels a hand, tentatively on his back. 

“Poe,” says Finn. “Let’s….let’s go.”

Poe turns around to see a few faces, peering at him from across the hanger. He spots a few of his squadron, the brown-eyed mechanic, even BB-8 watching him with barely concealed interest, with pity. Some have the sense to turn around when he catches their eyes - some don’t.

“I’m fine,” Poe spits out.

“C’mon, man,” Finn pleads. 

Poe lets Finn help him to his feet, lets himself be leaned against the ladder while he gets steady on his crutches, but it’s less an acquiescence and more because Poe is in such pain and such shock that his brain doesn’t seem able to catch up.

“I want to get up there,” Poe says. 

“I know,” Finn says. He takes a breath. “Poe. I don’t think you’re gonna be able to do that anymore.”

Poe wants to say _what do you mean_ or _just you watch_ but instead he swings a punch against Finn’s chin, hard. 

He falls over, because punching Finn meant letting go of his crutches. But he doesn’t regret it. He doesn’t.

*

There are reprimands. There are angry voices, and careful voices, and pitying voices. There are words like _sorry_ and _honorable_ and _discharge_. 

And that’s it. 

Poe Dameron is no longer a pilot - at least not of starfighters. They tell him that he can fly cruisers and freighters and other hunks of junk that blur the line between civilian and military, ships that have ramps up into them, that don’t require legs to fly, that he has no fucking interest in seeing the cockpits of. 

He feels...empty. When he looks in the mirror Poe doesn't really recognize himself anymore, so he stops doing that, and looks at his leg instead. He traces the scars with eyes that flicker feverishly, eyes that are circled with dark smudges testament to his lack of sleep. There has to be some answer there to how it came undone, somewhere underneath the skin, somewhere deep down.

Weeks pass. Poe talks to barely anyone. He doesn't go to the hanger anymore and avoids anyone who tries to find him to make conversation. Finn stays away. Even BB-8 has been assigned to another pilot - after all, what good is an astromech droid to a...whatever he is now? Poe begins to understand that there is nothing in this universe more boring than uselessness. He swallows the hot shame, the ball of fury and unfairness and self-pity and allows General Leia to convince him of the importance of flying supplies to some outer rim planet, a bullshit milk-run mission if ever he did see one. But it means flying again, and it means getting away from Finn who is everywhere even when he’s not. Even when Poe hasn’t seen hide nor hair of him since that day in the hanger, even when the only proof that Finn even exists is the slight ghost of him when Poe enters the mess hall and knows that Finn just left, that same buzz of presence that Poe felt when he was lying in that infirmary bed.

The mission is boring and uneventful and hugely successful. So there comes another. And another. Poe’s mostly flying some knocked-about freighter that’s big and clunky and as ugly to fly as she is to look at, but it’s good to see the stars again, even if it feels like moving through treacle with lead weights on his ankles.

Then, on the fourth mission, they are intercepted by the First Order. It’s some small-fry Lancer class frigate with no-one very important on it, but their insistence that they are a freelance mining company and not remotely Resistance aligned is discovered as the bantha-shit it is when some petty officer recognizes the X-Wing Captain Poe Dameron. “Former”, Poe says as they drag him away. “Gotta update those ‘wanted’ holos, guys.”

...


End file.
